CenLAw
Kellye, the true crime enthusiast, and Kyler, her willing partner, delve into intriguing cases from Central & Northeastern Louisiana.
From small-town cases to nationally known crimes, they bring you stories that hit close to home, always with that Louisiana connection.
Tune in bi-weekly for your true crime fix and support their show for a shout-out in the next episode.
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CenLAw
Beneath the Victory Cheers - The Case of Ivrin Bolden, Jr. Case - 1/2
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Episode- Prepare to be transported to Monroe, Louisiana, where prosperity and poverty cast long shadows over a notorious murder case that raises more questions than answers. As your hosts, Kellye and Kyler, we're peeling back the layers of a city's history and the complex web of relationships within a famed college basketball team. This episode is not for the faint-hearted; we're tackling sensitive subjects, including sexual assault and brutal violence, through the lens of a community grappling with its demons.
Join us for an episode that dances on the knife-edge of truth, where sports glory and community pride collide with a legacy of racism and scandal. We chart the rise of the Northeast Louisiana University Lady Indians basketball team amidst an era of social taboos and uncover the seismic impact of a same-sex relationship scandal during the buttoned-up 1980s. Through Fran Parker's narrative "The Deadly Triangle," we question the fragile blend of fact and fiction, scrutinizing a story that could have altered the course of college athletics. We confront the chilling disappearance and murder of Brenda Spicer, a case entangled with the pressures of college sports and the shadowy figure of Ivrin Bolden Jr., revealing a Monroe still haunted by the past.
As we dissect the Brenda Spicer murder case, every thread unspooled leads us deeper into a labyrinth of suspicion, relationships strained to the breaking point, and the fight for justice in a world where the rules of evidence were as yet unrefined by modern science. Was Ivrin Bolden Jr. simply a scapegoat, or did his family's influence veil the truth? We navigate a trial mired in community politics, where the testimonies of coaches, presidents, and peers wove a tapestry of doubt. For those who seek to understand the heart of Monroe's darkest hour, and for the minds that demand to consider what lies beneath the surface of justice, this is an episode you cannot afford to miss.
Sources:
- Parker, Fran. Deadly Triangle: A True Story of Lies, Sports and Murder. Illustrated ed., New Horizon Press, 2009
- https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-06-16-sp-1948-story.html (Joel's body found)
- https://tulsaworld.com/news/states-disagree-on-death-probe/article_f6b65dcc-a28d-5803-9dbb-97e3092ba721.html (Joel - jurisdiction)
- https://newsblaze.com/usnews/crime/a-three-way-toxic-love-affair-with-a-deadly-twist_63906/
- https://www.newspapers.com/image/220850681/?clipping_id=141524395
- https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-07-sp-8178-story.html
- https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1987/12/16/Judge-denies-change-of-venue-in-college-murder-case/6175566629200/
- https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-jackson-sun-memphis-joel-tillis-mi/17368623/
- https://images.app.goo.gl/YZ2zJ6wVzLqSN8Qk7
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In the 1980s, monroe, louisiana, was a place at first and last, the highest concentration of millionaires per capita, juxtaposed against the third highest poverty rate per capita in America, the cheapest place to retire and high on the list of most likely places to be murdered. That is a quote from Fran Parker's novel Deadly Triangle. That is the intro to chapter two, dreams and Nightmares. Our story today is going to take us on a crazy, wild journey through one of the most notorious murder cases that ever hit Monroe.
Speaker 2:Join us today on Senla for episode 22,. Part one of two.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to our better late than never. Episode 22 of Sun Law. I'm Kelly.
Speaker 2:And I'm Kyler.
Speaker 1:And we're going to tell a really crazy story. I will not weave it high, but I'm here right at the gate. This is a trigger warning that is going to cover both. I'll say it again for the second part but we are going to be talking about many adult themes that no child should listen to. It's going to involve sexual assault, graphic descriptions of rape and murder At the same time. Just a bunch of things that you don't don't want children listening to. So this is the heads up Listener discretion extremely advised.
Speaker 2:Hi kids, hi wife.
Speaker 1:So I promise, watch it. I perish Monroe, I am not picking on you on purpose.
Speaker 2:You got some crazy ass ancestors.
Speaker 1:Well, not just that, but like apparently all of the things that I stood out in the memories of people that listen to our podcast come out of Monroe. So this is a listener suggestion, the first email suggestion we ever received and I would have. I would have gone in order that I received them and I plan to do that from here on out. But the Jimmy Townsend episode. It felt like I needed to get that one out as soon as possible to get maximum exposure and hopefully that has actually done some good. But we'll see soon and hopefully we'll have an update coming up on that within the next month or so. But we'll see. We'll see how that goes.
Speaker 2:And, as in, we had an episode that needed to go out because it was still, it was still pertinent, it was still relevant.
Speaker 1:It was not solved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we like trying to help stuff, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1:So today's episode is solved, but I guess we'll leave it up to your yeah, exactly, you get to decide whether or not justice was served in this case, and that's all I'm going to say on that, and you get to form your own opinions, I guess. So, yeah, that's free will.
Speaker 2:That's how that works.
Speaker 1:Right, right, but I mean, my opinion is going to be, if it's not blaringly obvious by the end of the first part, like it's going to be glaringly obvious by the second part. So we are going to travel back in time a little bit and before we start, yeah, we're the way back machine. Oh yeah, this is back before I always even born as old as, anyway. So a little bit of background on Monroe. That I didn't really do in the Townsend episode because that was more just trying to get to the meat and potatoes, as they like to say. But apparently Monroe was once known. I think they called the original name for it was Fort Miro, and it eventually became the city of Monroe and it was known for its the Delta area, from where the Mississippi runs right beside it and that it really good cultivating ground and soil and all Anyway.
Speaker 2:So America's fertile crescent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go. So, and surprisingly, and these are, these are facts that I did not know or even would have guessed, but Monroe was actually the birthplace of a couple of really lucrative and still ongoing company giants today. Don't one of them, Delta, which is why I mentioned that Delta Airlines actually got its start here as a crop dusting operation and then they eventually grew into the you know mega million billion airline thing that they are now. So the other one, which I thought was really crazy Coca Cola's first bottling plant started here, I mean in Monroe. It was located in Monroe and that was in 1912. And it was inherited by somebody, some guy.
Speaker 1:Anyway, he ended up making the bottle the first bottling plant there in Monroe, which I thought was really pretty cool. But that's where the good stuff pretty much ends until later, in later years. Well, because Louisiana is not known for being very adaptive and accepting and engaging with new ideas, it's not that, we're not that, and we have that ongoing. What do they call that? Almost like survivor's guilt. But yeah, so we're sorry, our ancestors sucked.
Speaker 2:Oh so white people.
Speaker 1:Exactly exactly the white people. So we go through a roller coaster of racism, slavery and the still. You know, like I said, guilty, conscious for the sins of our ancestors which is Some of our current. Yeah, well, I'm getting there.
Speaker 2:I couldn't figure out how to say that properly.
Speaker 1:Right, well, the ever present, and still currently present, unfortunately, because as much as we like to think that we're progressing and we're, you know, adapting and becoming more accepting and all of that stuff, we still have people that I know them, I speak to them, that have no problems being blatantly and overtly racist. So I mean, that's still there, it's still present. So you can imagine, in the year that we're going to be talking about, back in the 80s in Monroe, they were still working on being understanding and accepting of, you know, all people, all kinds, whether it be race, sex or orientation or anything like that. It was just not something that we were working on it. We were trying, but it wasn't widely acceptable. So one thing that always seemed to manage to make that line of segregation a lot more blurry was sports, and you know, especially in the United States, that they're more specifically college sports, because people go crazy over the Final Four, the March Madness, all of that stuff. I mean, like all of it's got a lot of. You know, you have a way of being able to look past whatever color, whatever sex, whatever else. It's the sport, it's the camaraderie, it's the game itself. So that brings everybody together and there really wasn't a better example of the acceptance and progressive thinking than that of the NLU or the Northeast Louisiana University Lady Indian's basketball team.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to be quoting throughout the episode a little bit from Fran Parker's what I mentioned in the intro, her novel the Deadly Triangle. That was actually suggested in the email that that novel was kind of like the synopsis and link to go look at the actual novel was included in the email and I bought it. I bought it first thing, like that was the first thing I read about. I didn't read anything else. I didn't go searching the newspapers which I have done since, but that was the first thing I read was this novel by Fran Parker, and I'm going to say that it was a wealth of information.
Speaker 1:It was not the easiest read but it was good. It had a lot of good information. However, I will caution anybody who is interested in reading up on this specific case. In general, the novel itself is not solely a true story. By that I mean she took a lot of what you call those liberties artistic liberties in her own knowledge and conversations that she had with people from the time period and that were involved in the case, and she put that together in a way to make it seem like she was speaking as either the people or that she had the actual knowledge. So you have to go into an understanding that a lot of the information, a lot of the chapters that she writes about that are speaking like its fact is her rendition. So it's kind of like this is what I think and believe, based on what everybody told me. This is the best descriptive imagination act.
Speaker 2:So essentially it's a whole ass book of hearsay.
Speaker 1:Basically, but there's also a lot of fact in it, because she does have like facts are correct, but the same facts that you can look up online through the newspapers. All of that information is correct. It comes down to what they were thinking or what they said, that they did, because there was no way for me to verify it one way or the other. There's a couple of spots and I'll make sure and tell you guys when I'm speaking, fran speak, or when I'm actually speaking from fact, verifiable fact.
Speaker 2:So it is both fact and opinion and her own introspection and understanding of what happened.
Speaker 1:And yes, it's an artistic liberty of what information she got from people who were there. But then you have to take into account that people's memories can be faulty. People can hyperbolicize or understate. I mean like there's all kinds of problems with going solely off, of relying off of someone's word. So that's all I have to say about that. So I will make note of it whenever I do say something that is coming from there, because everybody who listens to the show should know at this point that I don't go off the cuff If I can't verify it at least once. More than likely, I like to have it at least twice before I ever bring it up or I pull into the speculation station. Those are the two options. So that's basically where we're at with that. So hold that aside.
Speaker 1:We were talking about the fact that sports brought people together, has been doing so for many, many years, and it blurs all those lines of sex, race, all of the things. And Fran Parker actually, in her novel she stated that, quote NLU sports gave citizens a unified cause to applaud, unquote. And when the ladies, they actually rocketed to fame in 85 under coach Linda Harper, which I'll talk about her in a bit they were the number two college team in the nation and the entire community around Monroe especially, but like the whole state basically, they were just excited and even more unified and they could not have been more unified in pride and celebration. So the unfortunate other side to that story is the fact that although the analysts that at the end of the season of 85, they predicted them to be the number one seed for the next year, but they didn't predict this.
Speaker 1:Well, not even this. There was another scandal that hit before this ever even happened. So they were predicted to be the number one team, but then the NCAA apparently decided that they were going to make an example out of NLU. For whatever reason, I don't know who peed in their Cheerios and they blamed it on NLU. But that's what it seems like, and I keep saying NLU, northeast Louisiana University. You guys probably know it. If you know it by a different name, it's actually University of Louisiana, monroe, ulm.
Speaker 1:Now, and I'll have the progression of name changes that they had from the time that they opened all the way through today, because they went from a few different names and now they've even switched mascots because apparently, just like all other people that either were the redskins or the whatever's, they were the Indians. So they've changed it now to the Warhawks. So NLU Lady Indians, in today's language, are the ULM Lady Warhawks. So that's where that is and it's Yep, yep, that's where we're going to go with that. So this is 85 when this happened initially, so when they got to the Final Four. This is the. I don't know what I'm saying. I think it's the first and last and only time that this college has ever reached the Final Four. Yeah, poor babies, that was the last time they won an NCAA tournament game and yeah, they didn't win any after that.
Speaker 1:Now they were also, you know, they got a lot of firsts here. They were the first women's team in the NCAA ever to be sanctioned. Now, the men all across the country, the men were sanctioned left and right because they had a really bad habit of riding their players to come to them. They wanted the best players, so they would do whatever they needed to do to get them where they wanted them to go, and they had, up to that point, only ever sanctioned men. And all of this was done under Coach Harper, linda Harper. She was hired in 1978 and she actually was a coach all the way through 1990 when she retired. So it was about 12 years and she is Well. She was, all the way up until 2009, the all-time winningest coach in ULM history and she had in 1985 alone, when they got to the Final Four and they only lost to the winners, which was Old Dominion, but they lost to them by 10 points in the Final Four and that year alone they had two separate 15 game winning streaks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they were pretty balling. Hell, yes, anyway, I know that was terrible. But so all of that to set this stuff up, because when they got sanctioned in 1986 they actually got a total of six infractions by the NCAA. One player was rendered ineligible for the rest of the 86 season and the entire team was ineligible for any postseason play. Yeah, and they forbid Coach Harper from recruiting for a year. Now these sanctions were Okay. The official story is that they were using improper recruiting techniques. They had an unofficial, undocumented, some kind of unreported tryout quote, unquote for the player that was later rendered ineligible. But they also said that they were giving her improper gifts, that like the watch and that let her borrow a car. This was all the official statement.
Speaker 2:Okay now. Rendered ineligible is a real fancy way of saying murdered.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, not that one.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is a different yeah, no, no, she was also rendered ineligible.
Speaker 1:She had already been kicked off the team at that point. So we're getting ahead of ourselves. The official story was all of that, those sanctions, but the sewing circles said the newspaper version was just the college's way of keeping the actual improprieties under wraps. Because the thought of a lesbian recruiter interaction was way beyond the comprehension and carried the possibility of irrevocably damaging the reputation of the college as a whole and for what was at that point the most lucrative import portion of the entirety of the college at that point, for that to become damaged beyond repair, especially social repair. Nobody's gonna wanna give money to a bunch of lesbians and I love everyone, by the way, this is not me saying this, this was the thought at the time.
Speaker 1:So the same sex relationships that were whispered about stayed nothing but gossip for the time being and kinda got swept under the rug underneath this veil of oh, this is everything that we did wrong and the improprieties that they're talking about between the recruiter and the recruiter were nothing. But you know, unsanctioned practice or unsanctioned Try, whatever, whatever. And they talked a lot about it in the papers, but only in so much as to say like, basically, you know, you bit back at the NCAA and were like this is bull crap. You guys are picking on us. You know you're just making an example out of us, but trying every and any way to make it hyper-focus on something other than what it might possibly. You might have heard that it was something else, but we're gonna try to hyper-focus on everything that isn't to do with the actual relationship between the recruiter and the recruity. So she was fired.
Speaker 1:That recruiter was Good, but she was a young looking looking woman that was, you know, in a probably improper relationship, regardless of if it's same sex or not, but not a good thing for, especially at the time. Because all of that is just to make sure that we get the right setting and feel and mindset for this story, because in 87, a year that was still non-accepting of gays in any way, much like last year, and you couldn't, even if you were rich and even if you had, you know, your influence or your family's backing, all of those things, you were not accepted but you were restricted to the army role.
Speaker 2:Don't ask, don't tell.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah, and if you had your, they called you quirky, they called you eccentric.
Speaker 2:And that's if you were rich, that's if you're rich. If you weren't rich, you were put in San.
Speaker 1:Ontario you were pariahed, yeah, so.
Speaker 2:Which is a fancy word for a mental hospital.
Speaker 1:And now we were talking about the race situation earlier, especially in Louisiana, and, like I said, we were trying as a whole. We were trying, but it was still enough of a thing to see an interracial couple out in public, because they weren't shunned entirely like they were just, you know, a couple decades earlier, but they were still definitely noticed and like it noticed in a way that stood out like someone wearing bright pink at a camouflage convention, like it was something that you took notice of and were like huh, okay. And it was more memorable because you know you were more likely at this time, you would be more likely to recall seeing a tall black woman and a white man outside the Piggly Wiggly, because those things just didn't go unnoticed and they weren't a frequent occurrence, lod, no, so even though it wasn't outright, you know, looked down upon, you weren't spit on or anything like that anymore, but it was still very notable, okay. So keep all that in mind. And similar sentiments could be said for the same sex couples, except they're still back in the dark ages of don't come out, don't tell anybody about it and you're gonna get made fun of. You're probably going to get, unfortunately, if you're not just made fun of. You're beat up or, you know, threatened and a lot of bad, bad things.
Speaker 1:But at this point in the late 80s they were getting a little bit better. You know, after the free love 70s stuff and it was still very taboo, very looked the other way, but not so much because it was like, oh, they're still gonna whisper, they're still gonna talk. It's not even whisper, they're just going to talk about. Oh, they spend a lot of time together, too much time, if you ask me. I saw them holding hands and smiling each other like they were together together, you know, raising eyebrows, air quotes, all of the things. So not even sports fame, not even nearly getting an NCAA championship, not any amount of money could keep you from the insidious gossip that comes when friends become too friendly and they are of the same gender.
Speaker 1:So, and like I said, this was the year of Lady Indians basically bankrolling the entire college and you know you have this recent scandal of impropriety and, first time ever, women sanctions hanging over your head. There's a room for tomfoolery or something as menial as, like teenage young love, to come into any kind of contradictory situation. I ain't gonna get in between me and my money and it's definitely something that was in the back of everybody's mind as the events that I'm about to unfold for you unfolded so much. Like bad press for normal reasons is bad, you know. Think about that in a way of having to deal with bad press that is also not accepted, like it's the most unacceptable of actions and it's just, it's all bad, all of it wrapped in bad. So the last thing that you want is any kind of innuendos or assumptions being made about you coming off of this year penalization from the NCAA, and you're trying to fly as under the radar as you can possibly get. So at the time of our story in 1987, NLU had been sailing along for 53 years of operation and had yet to see any horrors like that of which unfolded On the morning of March 6th. No one would fully understand the full weight of these events for years and years, and there's a reason that the history of NLU slash ULM on their website today only goes back so far. Even though these 1980s teams accomplishments were very high in regard, it's apparent that no amount of good press could make up for the overwhelming bad that was about to rain down on the Southern town. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, I liked that one. It was nice.
Speaker 1:The night of March 5th was the Lady Indian's last home game and I think it was their last conference game of the season which they won.
Speaker 1:They blew them away by like 20 points, right, but they couldn't.
Speaker 1:Even that win couldn't keep the teammates from being concerned and worried for their former teammate, 18 year old Brenda Spicer, who never would have missed the game, like the only reason she was there in Monroe was to be able to support her team and be there for the last game.
Speaker 1:And for one other reason we'll get to that in a minute and no one had seen her since earlier that evening, at about 5.30, 5.45, and no one could figure out where she went. No one could get in touch with her and this is 87, they don't have cell phones and they're just in general overall like hey, we can't find her. Even coming off of this win. They were just still overly concerned and the entire. There was a big black cloud just hanging over the entire team and the coach was contacting teammates, teammates was contacting coach, everybody was just trying to figure out where she is and make sure she was safe, and that led into the early morning hours of March 6th. Now, before we get too deep into that story, I'm sure you can tell just by the way that it's been set up here that Brenda is gonna be our murder victim, especially in part one it's gonna be in part two.
Speaker 2:Hey spoiler alert.
Speaker 1:But the morning of March 6th 1987, her body was found half closed in a dumpster on campus and it wasn't a pretty sight. The janitor was coming to do his normal trash stuff that he did and he came upon her body, called the police and I think he actually called the campus security first and they eventually got to police.
Speaker 2:So frigging rude and insensitive to the janitor, like what the hell? I understand that somebody's gotta find the body every time, but like I don't think he was even thinking about that, to be honest.
Speaker 1:So he finds the body, reports it, they get the officers and everything over there. They start doing a normal crime scene like that. The one officer he felt really bad about having to leave her half nude. He wanted, like his gut feeling, was to cover her but to protect the integrity of the crime scene. He didn't, which was the right thing to do.
Speaker 1:But according to everything that I read and from the novel itself, her body was found. Her bra had been cut, a clean cut in the middle. Her shirt was not there. Her khaki pants were pulled halfway down. I believe she had socks and shoes on. They didn't know it at the time. What was her, what her cause of death was? They would have to wait a little bit to sit her off to Beauser City to be autopsied. But just from the look of it they could see bruising on her shoulders and that she didn't have any other signs of physical damage. Like there was no obvious sign of cause of death. Sorry, no physical trauma, just a little bit of a shock, I don't know, I don't know, no obvious sign cause of death.
Speaker 1:sorry, no physical trauma noted Right, right, right, other than the fact she was in a dumpster and then had the bruising and that her clothing was disheveled and obviously looked like she had been in some kind of struggle. So the other thing they made note of, however, was the fact that she had on all her jewelry. She had diamond studs, in her ear, she had a gold charm bracelet on her wrist and on her other wrist she had an NCAA championship watch. Which you only get, if you.
Speaker 2:When the NCAA championship Go to the Final Four.
Speaker 1:It's about like the rings or whatever they give you for making it, and then you get the championship ring, but you get a ring for the men and they go to the NCAA championship. You get a ring the women, apparently in the 80s I don't know if they still do. I didn't look up that part, but they got a watch and Brenda, who was just you, would think it would be the other way around. She had just started in the fall of 86, so she wasn't a part of the 85 NCAA Final Four. So where did that watch come from?
Speaker 1:It's where we take a step back and we go back again.
Speaker 2:Going back, back, back, back, back, back to actually 1967.
Speaker 1:Joelle LaShawn Tillis was born. She was born in 1967 and was known for her trademark gapped tooth grin and a preference for the finer things in life which kind of didn't mesh well. Never mind the fact that she was born into poverty and by age seven was a child of divorce, living with a single mother raising her and her two sisters in a small town, in the small town of Hammond, louisiana, and barely scraping by. Joelle decided very young that she was never going to struggle like her mother had and made it her mission to take care of her mother and her sisters and make something of herself and kind of make clean up. Nice, basically. And she managed her own way out of Hammond by playing basketball, something her six foot stature greatly helped with.
Speaker 1:She was recruited and began going to NLU in the fall semester of 1983, and, wouldn't you know, she met the supposed matchmaker in Silver Platter Heaven. She met a man named Ivren Ivren I-V-R-I-N. Ivren Bolden Jr. He's a pre-med student from a very prestigious and wealthy family from Shreveport, louisiana. He had money, he had brains, he was six foot six, which was perfect for this six foot tall Joelle, who had no qualms with immediately becoming an item and accepting all of the flattery and attention and, of course, the gifts that came along with Bolden's affections.
Speaker 1:But the wrinkles didn't take long to start wrinkling and although it was never bad enough to take away the high-class dream of Easy Living that came along with him, but it was definitely tumultuous and a lot of that came from the fact that Joelle and Bolden both were highly competitive. They had things about the other that they were jealous of. So, like Joelle was jealous of Bolden's money obviously in his you know push life and Bolden was really jealous of the fact that Joelle was ridiculously popular and liked, or just loved and just popular in general the fact that she could just walk into a room and everybody liked her. He hated it because it wasn't like that for him. He didn't come that easy. Like money was his winner, it wasn't his personality and he was never-.
Speaker 2:Which is usually the case in those cases.
Speaker 1:Right, and from the novel. Apparently a friend of the family told Fran that he was the type of person that he couldn't lose. It wasn't an option. So if you were playing like a new card game, say, he would keep playing not only until he won, but until he had won more times than anyone else, and he would like insist that you kept playing until he got to that point where he had won more than anybody else. So he was a really competitive really almost like brow-beaten into him, hushabase about winning and doing well.
Speaker 1:So much so. And then again, this is from the novel but his parents were not okay with him not being the best. So much so that when he graduated from Fair Park High School he was in line to be the salutatorian, which is great. His average was, his GPA was like 4.535 or something crazy, but he was still not number one. He wasn't going to be a salutatorian and when his parents found that out they basically talked his school into letting him take two or three extra credit classes to be able to nudge him just enough above to be the salutatorian. Funny thing about that even though he was technically a salutatorian, he was still quoted as being salutatorian in some of the articles that I noticed from these cases. So I thought that was pretty funny. That might have been a spoiler alert, anyway. So they become an item pretty quickly in 1983, but when they meet at NLU and, like I said, from the first interactions, basically they were glued at the hip. A funny thing to note.
Speaker 1:They didn't go back to Ivern Bolden's family a lot like for vacations or for holidays. They often went to Hammond, to Marla Spates, which was Joelle's mom. They would go visit her and go spend holidays with her because her mom was way more accepting and understanding and just glad that Joelle had found someone. But Bolden's family kind of looked at Joelle like a gold digger and didn't approve of that relationship at all really and kind of shunned her. Even when she was invited to holiday dinners and things and outings that she was still kind of looked down on. We are better than you, we make more money than you. You're just here because you want some of it. Basically was how she was treated initially.
Speaker 1:So they are cruising along and, like I said, the cracks start early and they just keep getting worse. And keep getting worse because Joelle starts to realize that she is being smothered and being kind of dictated and controlled by.
Speaker 1:Ivern and towards the end of his college career, because he was already there when Joelle got there in 83. They met in 83, he was already there. So he actually graduated in 86 and she continued until 87, the end of 87, 87-88. So by the end of his getting near the end of his college career was basically when she started to realize, like this is when it all cracked up to be. But then they had already been so co-mingled for so long. At that point it had been three years that they had gone and they basically spent every holiday together.
Speaker 1:He would go and see her mother, without him or without her, like he would just go visit her mom. And I feel like and I think Fran actually mentioned this in her novel is that he craved that kind of loving family, that accepting, nurturing mother like Joelle's mom, and he had never really had that. So when he got that from her he kind of clung to that because he had a lot of money thrown at him, he had a lot of expectations thrown at him, but it wasn't love, it was do good or else. So he had already dug his feet in pretty deep and he was obsessed. He wasn't going to let go easy, he was going to ply her with gifts.
Speaker 1:I think one of the birthday presents he gave her was he rented an entire yacht and a crew to serve just the two of them as they like cruised around the golf yeah, like shrimp cocktail, champagne, all that. And that's that money, money. We're not talking about a little bit of money, damn Money, money. And a car that he had in his name that he gave to her like it was a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but like that happens still pretty regularly. You don't see many mothers just renting a yacht and a crew.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So all of these things were very enticing. But again, joelle felt smothered and she was one of those people. She was the life of the party. She liked to interact with people. She was a people person.
Speaker 1:She was given many nicknames. One of them was like Princess Die, because she was always like trying to be fancy and fruit fruit, but she was always smiling. And then the other one was like Queen's something or another. Anyway, she was well known and very popular. Like you have more than one nickname by different groups of people throughout your life, like you've made an impression right. So good nicknames, hushabase. So she is popular, vivacious, the life of the party. But the more attention she got and the more attention she gave to anyone other than Bolden created issues In his mind. He was supposed to be the only and most time consuming relationship that she had and when he started to feel like he wasn't, it got rough. Like he would throw fits, he would get upset, he would make her feel bad and cut off conversations and he would sit on the phone and tell her she needed to get off the phone with whoever it was she was talking to. Like just very controlling, very jealous, very overbearing All I'm getting right now is conspiratorial.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's not it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, just not good, all of the not good. So by the time Brenda Spicer rolls up oh, I did mention that Joelle is also because she played basketball she was obviously playing for NLU, right, the Lady Indians. She was on the team that went to the Final Four at the NCAA. So guess what she had? The Watch, the Watch. Oh, the chains are starting to link.
Speaker 2:The Chains.
Speaker 1:Tune. And also I don't know if I mentioned this because I'm really bad at this she's black, so is Ivern, both from black families, vastly different upbringings, whatever. Like I said, one was wealthy, they were poor, slum, whatever, low, low economy, low low class. He was upper middle. And then you've got Brenda Spicer, who is a five foot eight white girl from Gina. She was born in 1968. Was he an intonation on purpose? What intonation? Anyway, a five foot four white girl from Gina, pretty much so.
Speaker 1:Born to Charles and Pauline Spicer, she graduated Gina High School in 85 after she took her team to the sweet 16. She, according to all sources, all papers that I read, she lived basketball. She was very popular. She was also a member of the National Honor Society. Almost every year, every semester, she was on honor roll, according to the papers, and she loved basketball more than anything. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that her life was easy. Although her family was upper middle class and she was liked by everybody, she had a hard experience, a couple of hard experiences, but one that really, really really damaged her was she was actually a trigger warning. She was gang raped. Oh, come on. She was gang raped in high school by a team. They shoved her into a locker room and just brutalized her A bitty girl After that.
Speaker 2:So she came back and she beat all the asses in basketball.
Speaker 1:Pretty much. But basketball became her way of kind of taking back that power. She went through a lot of therapy. She had a lot of ups and downs. Obviously, the day that goes through something that traumatic, they're going to have things to work through.
Speaker 2:They got to work through the trauma, things to redo the sentence just so that I don't laugh.
Speaker 1:It's fine, I can edit it out. So by the time she graduated she was in a much better place mentally, but she still wasn't quite happy. I mean, there was always something that was different, there was always something that was off. And if you haven't guessed by now, guys, she was gay. She's 100 million thousand percent gay.
Speaker 2:But as a time.
Speaker 1:She couldn't tell anybody, she couldn't even begin to pretend to express that, even with her family and something as close as they were, everyone knew that that was not okay. You couldn't talk about it, you couldn't be out.
Speaker 2:So you mean to tell me that a little girl that got gang raped by an entire team doesn't like men?
Speaker 1:She didn't like them before that, but she definitely didn't like them after.
Speaker 2:Damn sure the reason or not, it got solidified Right.
Speaker 1:So she just pushed her that much further away from that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, yeah, whoops, yeah, it's okay. I figured it was going to happen anywhere. So, like I said, she'd worked through a lot of the trauma, she worked through a lot of her issues by the time she hit NLU. She was recruited and 1985, she started that fall semester, coming off of their final four win at the NCAA tournament, right. So she was technically retarded for her freshman year, which just means that they were saving her to be able to be eligible for a year on the end, because you're only eligible to play for so many years in a row and not college Got it. So if you're retarded when you first get there because you're younger, they can actually wait to use you in a later year. Okay, okay so.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure that's the thing she was seated.
Speaker 1:Basically, but she was still a part of the team. She was still on the team and all of that, but she was also a part of the sanctions and everything else. So it kind of a glum year which turned even glummer Is that a word? In October of 86, because she had to have knee surgery which kind of put a damper on the whole playing for the team thing, because you know, once you go through knee surgery you have to do your recovery. All of that, and not only that, but then again in February of 87, she got hit with another knee surgery and this was the first day of practice that she took her knee out in October and then had to follow it up with another one in February. And so by that point a lot of other stuff had happened and we'll get there, but just keep that in the back of your mind. It was already kind of snowballing out of her biggest love of life, of basketball, was going down the drain just right out of the gate, which was so shitty.
Speaker 2:So did you find what happened Actually, like what happened to her knee. What was it? I have no idea, okay.
Speaker 1:I think she'd had knee problems in high school as well, but I think it was probably ACL or one of those that you know one of the ones that you're not really going to come back from.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I know she was going to try right, but then all of the other things that happened subsequent to the first surgery and I mean like she was still kind of hopeful all the way up until the end of.
Speaker 1:February, yeah, so they go through. And then Brenda and Joelle meet, obviously when Brenda joins the team, and that just so happened to coincide right around the time that Bolden actually had graduated and had started his pre-med classes down in New Orleans. Okay, so only shitty part about that was that Bolden, with his jealous, fucking overbearing bullshit that he would do, who was still trying to control her every move, joelle's every move, from New Orleans, and if he couldn't do that, he would come back on the weekends. And then he started coming back midweek. And then he started coming back and showing up every like every time she turned around and sounds like a good time to get a gun.
Speaker 1:Right. And so, slowly but surely, the more time she spent away from Bolden, joelle felt more free, like she was kind of like breaking the breaking the breaking through the fog, I guess of what his presence had caused her to feel and think and see, and also her newfound friendship with Brenda, and they were instant friends. Brenda was a hit from the get go, like she was immediately popular, immediately welcoming or welcomed onto the team and it's just immediately successful in making all of the friends they was fucking.
Speaker 1:And yeah, eventually. But they got that. Brenda and Joelle got extremely close. Some would say too close, most would. Others would say it's none of your business, let them love who they love.
Speaker 1:But my point for this story is that they did get very close and all of the teammates were aware of it and then every time that Ivern would call or ask about it they were. They would always be told that they were out together. And so his fixation of jealousy and just rage in general turned towards Brenda, which was evident by the handwritten letter that he wrote to her to back off and to leave him behind, and the multiple confrontations and arguments and conflicts that were very public in nature, because, I mean, they still lived in the dorm, they were part of the team, so they lived in the dorm and they had like a sister, big sister, little sister type thing. So like the freshman coming in would room with a senior and Brenda was a freshman, joelle was a senior, so it was kind of like that and that's kind of how the papers and everything played off their relationship and that's actually what Joelle was quoted later as saying was I was like her big sister. So, yeah, we get there, no, brenda and Joelle's relationship blooming, blossoming, both of them thriving in that and with the team, other than the surgery and stuff. But I mean they were still, you know, positive to a certain degree.
Speaker 1:But there were also the altercations and, you know, frictions that were caused by their relationship, taking time away from Bolton, and he didn't like it. He made it clear he didn't like it. There was one person on the entire campus that anybody could point to when asked like, who would not like, who would have caused, who would have caused to hurt or be upset with Brenda, they would all point at the same person, which would be Mr Ivern Bolton Jr man. I wonder why? No idea. So on the morning of March 6th, when her body is found and she's identified, actually by the coach of the basketball team, everybody's mind goes to the same thing and, yeah, nobody wants to say anything, nobody actually wants to point that finger. Eventually it does get pointed. But remember, this is a black family, this is a white woman. This black family, specifically, is very wealthy and very influential and probably very good donors. Oh, and did I mention the fact that the NLU Lady Indians were trying to recruit Ivern Bolton's little sister?
Speaker 2:No, I don't think you did.
Speaker 1:So why would you want this college to now point the finger at the older brother of the girl that you're trying to get on your team? To make your team better, to come back from these sanctions that you got, from being improper in a woman-to-woman relationship who now? There is a dead woman in a dumpster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, almost all rich kids have dead women in dumpsters.
Speaker 1:Right, so when?
Speaker 2:all of this came around.
Speaker 1:it wasn't so much that they didn't talk or that they didn't say what they thought, it was more, they only answered questions. They were asked, they didn't offer up information and they didn't come right out and say what they were feeling, thinking and what the majority of them knew to be true. And it gets worse Because in Fran's book she paints the picture of Brenda and Joelle as obviously being lovers, obviously being involved with each other, being caught in the bed in their dorms together, being told to stay away from each other except for practice not being able to do so. Basically the tug of war between Brenda and Ivern and basically having put Joelle in the middle of the two and making her decide when we're the other.
Speaker 1:Now all of this was kind of coming to a head because in the beginning of 87 January, february around there, like I said, things were kind of going snowballing downhill for Brenda because she had the first knee surgery, she was about to have another one, her dream of playing basketball in college was kind of looking like it wasn't going to work out and she was also a gay female in love with a gay black female. So when you talk about the tabooist of taboo relationships, at this point, you've got an interracial gay couple, so it wasn't looking good.
Speaker 1:And then, on top of that, you've got this bolden who throws money at her, gives her whatever she wants, but is also like disgustingly, disturbingly suffocating. And she still didn't feel like she could win, though, and a lot of times, because Joelle played both sides. It should be fair. She did. She, she'd accept all of the gifts and everything from Brenda, because she did, she gave her gifts as well. She, you know she had a little bit of money.
Speaker 1:She wasn't bold and yacht wealthy, but she was, you know, they brought up in a pretty wealthy family, and so she did play both sides of the loop because she just she liked having things and like getting the monies and having the choice, and so she would go from one to the other, and she knew what the acceptable relationship was. Joelle did, and she knew which one was going to be able to further her in her idea of where she wanted to end up in life, and it wasn't with the white girl in a gay relationship. That was a former teammate, you know what I mean. Like it just wasn't. It's one of those things that she knew what front she had to put up, regardless of how she actually felt inside. So around February Joelle ended up having a birthday party, invited both Ivern and Brenda, without telling the either that's a lot down.
Speaker 1:And then Ivern decided to have like a family dinner but then told Brenda she couldn't come because it was his family and Joelle. So Joelle went with him and Brenda didn't get to. So Brenda decided. This is at the birthday party. Yeah, she was okay. They threw a birthday party for Brenda at her mom's house. Right, they were both invited to that one Right. Joelle was invited to Ivern and his family's birthday celebration for her.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And Brenda wasn't allowed to go.
Speaker 2:Okay, because it was Ivern's family.
Speaker 1:And so Joelle was like okay, well, I'm going to go with him and go celebrate my birthday. Brenda, you can't go, and in a normal friendship there probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But this was. She was in love with this girl Right, 100% infatuated.
Speaker 2:And they it just didn't sound like it would be a big deal Like in this situation. I can fully see how it would be. It just it sounds really frigging trivial.
Speaker 1:Right. But, in her mind she was picking Ivern over her.
Speaker 2:No, no and I get that.
Speaker 1:I understand. And so that night later Joelle gets a call from her teammates. They are telling her that Brenda is really messed up. She took a lot of pills. She said she only wants her, that she's going to drive down to meet her and to see her because all she wants is to be with her. And Joelle leaves the party that Ivern is has thrown for her and she ends up meeting Brenda and the teammates at the hospital where they end up pumping Brenda's stomach call it a suicide attempt. And the coach actually shows up and says we'll take care of it on campus, because normally they would have like admitted her you know at least a 72 hour hold for psych. But the coach ushers the hospital that you know we'll take care of it and do it in-house and that way we can keep it out of the papers. And they leave that night. Couple of days later they officially cut Brenda from the team. So not only now does she have no future of basketball, and in her mind.
Speaker 1:Joelle keeps picking Ivern over her. So now she has no basketball, no hope, no future, and she actually withdraws from college as well. So she withdraws from college and goes back and spends some time with her mom, but she's still going back and forth to campus and now that she's no longer a student she doesn't have a room. So who does she stay with? Oh man, I wonder. Joelle and her roommate.
Speaker 1:And the night of their last home game on March the 5th, she was staying in the dorms with Joelle and her other teammates, or former teammates. At this point, but I mean, like at this point at the end of February, early March, she had kind of changed her disposition a little bit. She had decided that she was going to go ahead and enroll back in school and start taking in a couple of classes and to make her way back to the team after her recovery. But you know she was going to have a positive outcome. And this is where we get into the speculation and this is where her creative liberties come into play with the novel. She, in the novel Fran Parker's, she has a chapter where it's talking about the day of March 5th, the day before the murder, and she says that Joelle Just took license.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Sorry, I was just bothering because I knew we were off.
Speaker 1:So Fran says that Joelle had decided to completely break it off with Ivern and to you know, basically like cut that cord and be done with them and then officially, unofficially, be with Brenda, that they'd even set up this public breakup type situation where they would meet up at the ice cream shop and Ivern would go with Joelle and Joelle would meet up with Brenda, unknowingly by Ivern, and that once they got there, joelle did what she said. She told them that they were done, they were finished, and that was that. And according to the novel, which grain of salt? Ivern was like okay, that's okay, but we can still be friends, right? So Ivern said that, yeah, yeah no, he didn't.
Speaker 1:So, but I can believe it though, because of how the rest of this goes, to a certain extent, because let's play nice Like as competitive as he is.
Speaker 2:Let's play nice. As competitive as he is, you think that he just that he just took the loss and accepted it? Yes, I don't, not for a fucking second.
Speaker 1:He played like he did. Yes, he did, and there's a reason. So they go on, and earlier in the day, before they went to the ice cream shop, they I know Joel and Ivern had actually gone to a mini warehouse, a mini storage warehouse thing, because Ivern, when he had graduated the year before, he had actually put the majority of his stuff from there. He just put it into storage. And so they went over there to go get something out of storage some shoes or something and spent a couple of hours like rearranging the entire inside and like clearing out a space. Like half of the warehouse or half of their storage unit was like cleared out and they put, basically pushed everything to one side, so there was like a big empty space on one side. So really weird, really strange.
Speaker 1:Go to the ice cream parlor he gets broke up with and then that night was supposed to be the night of the last home game and at about like five-ish, joel and mom who would come up for the game.
Speaker 1:They wanted to go out to eat before the game and to have to spend a little bit of time together or whatever. They invited Ivern who was in the room. Brenda had gone back to hang out with the teammates or something, and so they go to eat, they invite Ivern. He's like nah, I think I'll just watch on TV, whatever, and then I'll meet y'all there.
Speaker 1:So at about 5.30, according to one of the teammates, there was a phone call from Ivern to Brenda in the room, in the dorm room, and once she got off the phone she said she was going to go meet Ivern to get a gift that he had got for Joel for her home game, which was not unusual he gave her gifts all the time but he said he needed Brenda's help and Brenda made the comment I may not come back from this and she left around 5.45. Now there was a camera that Brenda had that she was supposed to give to Ivern and meet up with him to give to him to take pictures of the game for memorializing her last home game, joel, because it was her senior year.
Speaker 2:It was her last game. I knew it was supposed to be funny, but that's really frigging poignant.
Speaker 1:So he was supposed to meet her to get the camera and whatnot, and then he called her ahead of time to go under the pretense of getting this gift ready for Joel as well, made the weird comments the teen made, left the room and from that point on no one saw her alive again. So as it stands right now we've got the only person on the planet that has caused to dislike Brenda is Ivren. The last person that was supposed to be making contact with Brenda was Ivren the last person to absolutely to have at least made contact with her at some point that night, because he had the camera that she had in her possession. So the camera that she had Ivren ended up with at the game with this said camera and she was never seen again until the next morning when she was found in the dumpster. Now the autopsy came back.
Speaker 2:Do we really need to try?
Speaker 1:after a little while oh yeah, we do so. The autopsy came back that she had died by what it was the craziest way that they braised this. So it was heart failure and lung embolism due to manual strangulation. Don't know why they had to get all crazy with it. She was strangled to death by someone taking their hands, wrapping them around her throat and crushing her neck until she could no longer breathe and was dead. Like that's where it wasn't because her heart failed. No, it was because somebody strangled the life out of her.
Speaker 2:Like cessation of life due to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, exactly. So not only that, but this is where it gets a little hinky, because this is where, yeah, in autopsy specifically because, the coroner, the medical pathologist. He couldn't say strictly that she had been raped because the vaginal, anal, all of the things, none of them showed trauma. Okay, that can mean a lot of different things. You know, some victims of a sexual assault can be coerced that you can still be raped without it being forceful. So, yeah, she could have already been dead, could have already been dead was one.
Speaker 1:Another is being held at night point is another. You remember her bra being split in the middle, clean cut.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would comply.
Speaker 1:No, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't, but with her and her trauma there was no way of knowing.
Speaker 2:No, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't.
Speaker 1:I just If you were in, the headlights blanked out, and then just you know, whatever you say, whatever, please don't do this. But like you know Right, there's no way of knowing for sure. So, anyway, he couldn't say for sure that she was assaulted. She could have said that she was raped, quote unquote. He could definitely say that, based on the bruise patterns on her shoulders and or her shoulders and inner thigh, inner thighs that it definitely looked like someone had held her down or held her in a position to allow for the sexual acts, and he found semen not only in her vagina and anus but also in her nose and mouth.
Speaker 2:Right, she wasn't raped.
Speaker 1:And also had saliva on her breasts and I want to say it was somewhere else too, but I think. But the saliva specifically was on her breast and the semen was in everything else, basically. So Not a lot else Like there was and the only other thing that he found how much else do you need Listen? Because again, it's one of those things that it becomes important. So the only other thing that he noticed that was of significance was a like a wad of bubble gum in her stomach. So it was like a chewed wad and he said that that could have ended up in her stomach, because most adults aren't going to swallow a big wad of bubble gum. He said that could have been from the strangulation or that's been this case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or the force of the you know that's a whole thing now, or it was for a long time, or something Like we have to be talked about it. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, other than that he couldn't say for sure that she was raped or that it was due to that. But, like, all of those things happened within the same amount of time and he put her time of death somewhere between 6 and 7 pm the night before her body was found. Okay, so that means that somewhere after 5.45, but before 8 o'clock that night she had been murdered and then her body had been dubbed and left in that dumpster. So last person she was supposed to be seeing, Ivern Okay, she supposedly shows up at the basketball game but no one ever sees Brenda. She's never accounted for. There were some articles that said she showed up to the beginning of the game and then left, but that didn't actually happen. She was never there. She was outside and had met with Ivern outside but they had gotten to a vehicle and like drove off. And that was the only other testimony from anybody that could have for sure said like this was the last time she was seen.
Speaker 2:It's like I don't like to, you know, speak ill of the dead. But what the hell, dumbass.
Speaker 1:Right, well, again, this is one of those things that you know she was trying to do what she thought would be in her best.
Speaker 2:She was trying to make nice so she could get more.
Speaker 1:She was playing the long game, right, the long con, yeah, so in her mind she wasn't technically scared of him, but I mean, like he worried her, sure that it wasn't something that she was Right. She had no cause to be afraid of him.
Speaker 2:Not really. He was real, real conny, and he was real persistent, but he had never done anything physical.
Speaker 1:He had never shown any signs of aggression like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I can, I can see that.
Speaker 1:The only other witness statement or witness testimony was not a very good one, but remember how I was talking about the time period and what stands out right now. So you're talking about a six foot six black man and a five foot eight white woman blonde white woman, Five foot eight isn't that small. With six foot six, it's still a noticeable difference.
Speaker 2:Black and white. Definitely something that you're gonna remember.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's still a foot difference, especially for these people in the south that are still, ooh, that kind of idea, like I said in the beginning, and there was a guy who, a gentleman he worked at and was the owner of a gas station that was across the road from the mini storage that just so happened to be the same mini storage that Ivorin and Joel had a locker in. That says, on that night, a little before six, he saw a tall black man and a short or white woman standing over by the lockers and one of the lockers had its door raised about halfway up. He said he saw them over there talking. They didn't look like they were having an altercation or anything. He said it almost looked like he was trying to convince her to come in. And then he said well, that's kind of weird, but again, interracial, not a thing, that's normal, not noticeable, remember, you remember, especially when there's a white girl body found the next day, it's something that sticks out in your mind. So the next time he looks up he sees that the car is still there, but a little bit after about six, six, 30, I think he said the car was gone, it was no longer there and the locker was all the way shut.
Speaker 1:Now he was not close enough and he was never able to fully say and identify who those two people were. He just had the general tall black man, short white girl. That was it. That was pretty much all he had. There was no other defining features. There was no definitive oh yeah, that was definitely Ivoryne and definitely Brenda. It was not like that. It was just kind of an offhand, like okay, well, this is the same warehouse, that might have been them, and so all of that. And then you've got the basketball game right. So Ivoryne's there, noticeably there, he's taking pictures, he even gets into almost like a shouting match with the ref at one point and is making a ruckus, basically making himself noticeable. Now this is the part where you're going to be really disappointed because, remember, joelle is playing in the game, joelle's mom is there in the stands and Ivoryne was sitting with the mom for the majority of the game.
Speaker 1:But there were at least two other witnesses that noticed and watched Ivoryne leave the gym, go out to the concession stand but then continue out the gym. And then the other witness one witness saw him leave the gym but the other witness actually saw him outside in the courtyard like running across the whatever you want to call that the green courtyard, the courtyard, the courtyard, not really, but like it's, like the, you know, the, the commons, the quad, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, so saw him running from the coliseum, which was the gym there, and then and that was a little after 6, 30. And when he came back to the gym and his his explanation later was I went down and got, I went to the bathroom and then I got a water for my sister or something, and then I came back and it was a really long line and that's why it seemed like I was gone for a long time.
Speaker 1:But there were plenty of people there who said I was there the entire game and you know, I was sitting next to Joelle's mom. She could tell you yada, yada, and the guy who saw him running was just, it was just the one guy and he said it was sure was him because he knew him from all of the things. But there was a noticeable change in clothes by at least two people who noticed and thought, wow, that's weird, why would he change clothes at halftime? And you would think that this would be easy to confirm, right?
Speaker 1:Because they record every game for practice and for, you know, for Playing back the tape to learn from it, for the basketball, for the girls specifically, and then also for, like, this was the last home game.
Speaker 1:So there were a lot more Like. Obviously they were going to record it and, strangely enough, the tape that was used that night to record the game. When the cops were heard that Ivern had changed clothes and were trying to later rule this out, they went to go check the tape out from the library where they kept all of the game tapes, and when they got there noticed that the last person to check out the tape had been Joel, and when they tried to play the tape it was no longer able to be viewed. It was irreparably damaged and no footage was able to be seen from the game from that night. And the camera that Ivern had that had all of the pictures that he was supposedly taking throughout the entire game didn't have any pictures of him, obviously, because he was the one holding the camera. So there was no proof that he had changed clothes, which he denied. He said he didn't do that.
Speaker 2:Of course he did so. Of course he denied it.
Speaker 1:It leaves or doesn't leave at half time, but he left at half time, came back and was there till the end of the game and then, at the end of the game, was in just like a real big hurry to get out of there, to leave. Now he drove his car back to New Orleans and then, after the body was found and they were trying to get witnesses and testimonies and statements from everybody, they called him and told him to come back. And this is the shittiest part of the story, other than you know Brenda losing her life.
Speaker 1:Nobody called her parents. The investigators were actually in Joel's campus dorm when her phone rang and answered it and it was Brenda's mom asking if anybody had heard from Brenda, because she hadn't called her, and the police at that time said oh yeah, sorry, your daughter was missing and, by the way, she's dead, jesus. But nobody had even called to tell her that she was missing from the night before.
Speaker 2:That's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's how they found out. They immediately came over and you know they had to identify the body and do all that and it was just not good. So they get Ivern back up and get him into the police station. Now, when they brought him in to speak with the police, apparently everybody and their mother and their dog showed up. So, like the basketball coach, the president of school, like all of these people show up Nobody showed up. When Brenda's mom and dad got there, nobody.
Speaker 2:Like there was no reason for them to even be there for Ivern.
Speaker 1:Anyway, he shows up and the first thing out of his mouth when he walks through the door is they were having a lesbian relationship and I was gonna. I'm gonna tell everybody about it if y'all try to pin this on me. Seriously, bro, Seriously, I thought you were supposed to be smart. What the hell are you doing? He goes in there without a turn. Maybe the school doesn't do anything to him. Yeah, pretty much that's exactly what happened. So he goes in there and he takes two, not just one, two. I just take the dress, feels him both Without an attorney, and I guess maybe he just thought that he was gonna like skirt and like shirt, whatever, All right.
Speaker 1:So Eventually they get a lawyer in there, Eventually they keep him from making any more statements and eventually comes back around to Joel and Joel says well, he was there the whole time, my mom can tell you. And sure enough, Joel's mom goes into the police station, makes her official statement that says yep, Ivern was there the whole time. He only left for a little bit at halftime to go get something from the construction stand and use the bathroom. But he was present and there and there is no way he could have done this. And then the very next day they go to the warehouse, the police do with a search warrant. They find what looks to be a spot or splotch of blood and they're also running tests. Now, this is the 80s.
Speaker 1:Okay, we have a very simplistic idea of what DNA is or how to test for it and how to use that in any kind of criminal investigation. I actually have a timeline but I don't even think I'm going to get into that because I'm already running a lot longer than I was going to or I had planned to. But this is already going to be two parts, so bear with me. So they find what they think is blood and I think they also take away like a stuffed animal or something from the warehouse. But there's also still. There's just not much. There's not much there. But they believe the blood to be Brenda's. But that nothing ever really comes of that. It just, you know, there's a possibility that, coupled with the eyewitness that saw a tall black man and a white woman there at around the same time that Brenda was supposed to have been murdered, and seeing that there was some kind of interaction of blood, but later Joelle comes back and says that she cut her hand or something in the storage space and that's where that blood came from. So she claims that as well. Lot of covering, lot of covering.
Speaker 1:So eventually what it comes back on the DNA from the semen and from the saliva. They find out that it is type A and the donor is a secretor. Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you haven't watched forensic files like I have. But a type A secretor, or just a secretor in general, is a person whose genetic material is actually present in things other than their blood. So like I think it's, like I want to say 80 something percent. I haven't written so okay, so it's completely independent of the blood type. So you can be a, b, a B or O, and you can be a secretor or a non-secretor. It's completely independent of either. So the antigens which are present in their blood will also be present in their body fluids like saliva or snot or tears. So or yeah, but that's a semen, but yeah, they also found saliva on a breast.
Speaker 2:Now, I just know they found a lot more than that.
Speaker 1:Right, but the only problem with that, though, is that a type A secretor. It's. Something like 80 percent of all people are secretors, so it's more more rare to be a non-secretor, for where your stuff isn't in any of your either ejaculate or your sweat or your saliva.
Speaker 1:So the saliva tested and the semen tested was a from a type A secretor, which Ivern was, but so was 80 percent of the population. So not a real good defining. You know it was definitely him. No, they didn't do that because they didn't have that specific DNA, not back then. So what you have is a lot of circumstantial, a lot of pieces. If you put them together and look at them a little bit sideways, they look like they fit. Plus, if you also take that into account, with.
Speaker 1:Nobody else had any reason to murder Rinda. Nobody else had any kind of conflict with her that could possibly have ended like that, not in that way. Now they didn't have any other evidence. They had no other way of proving one way or the other. They had a couple of eyewitness testimonies that showed. You know it could have been him. He could have had the opportunity. He was the only one who had the motive. But they had no way of actually putting him there, no way of actually putting his hands around her neck and no way of definitively saying as much.
Speaker 1:Now, what they did have was at least two people, one of which was the best friend of the murdered victim. Former team made big sister. According to her, who hadn't? You know what everyone would believe, no reason to stand up for someone who potentially could have murdered her best friend. But you had her testifying that he didn't do it. It couldn't have been him. He was at the game the whole time. And then you also had her mother saying the exact same thing. So when he came down to what they did and died him for second degree murder, he went to trial. He was set on bond. I don't think he got out on bond for about a month. After he tried to get a bond reduction the judge said hey, I'll know what. They went ahead and paid it, got him out and he tried to continue his classes but he ended up flunking out due to everything in the trial. So if he wasn't, already.
Speaker 1:He was already not doing well because he was so overly concerned with the relationship between Brenda and Joel. He was skipping classes, he wasn't going regularly and he was just failing in general because he wasn't as smart as he liked to believe he was, basically because his parents had, you know, silver plattered him all the way through, all of it, convincing him that he was smarter and better than he was. And he just he wasn't. So he gets indicted. They eventually go to trial in 88. And he's charged with second degree murder. They sit the jury with nine women, three men and after four days of testimony from all the different witnesses, including Joel and she was called for the prosecution. But she ended up being more of a defense witness and also her mother and and not just those two, but another cousin who comes into play later. His name is Shannon.
Speaker 1:He also testified on our Ivern's behalf, like and I say on his behalf, it was more like um, it just it bolstered him, looking better. There was not a bad word that anybody said about him. All of his former and like all of the newspaper articles that I read, all of them said how, um, how nice of a guy he was and how good and how friendly and how you know, just really smart and very, you know, well rounded. They couldn't see somebody like him doing something like that. It just didn't fit his character.
Speaker 1:And apparently the jury agreed with all of that and after three hours of deliberations, on March 13th 1988, he was acquitted. Not, not a mistrial, not a let's try this again in a minute no, he was found not guilty of second degree murder. And the one article that I saw and I'll post that on the Patreon, um, it said that the jury finds the alibi witnessed past the test. Like they put a lot of stock in the fact that Joelle and her mother vouched for him and gave him a solid alibi pretty much throughout the entirety of the time that it was said that, you know, brenda was supposed to have been murdered. So he was acquitted and shortly thereafter, um, joelle graduated and moved to a Kenton, new Orleans, and then they, within a month or so or a couple months, ended up moving to Memphis, tennessee, and that should be the shittiest end to any story ever, right.
Speaker 1:No oh no, there's still another murder, there's still another trial. Actually, there's two more trials, which is why this is probably one of the most interesting, even though it's from 87 initially. Like this is probably one of the most interesting legal cases that we've covered this far, because it gets so spiderwebby, especially in the next part. So this is where I'm going to leave you guys for this one. So he has been acquitted. He gets no punishment, no problems, no issues came from this.
Speaker 2:Like just be aware that if you're mad, you're not as mad as I am.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no, no. I was a gassed when I realized that, not like I was maybe a mistrial, that's what I was thinking but a quill, a quiddle. And for all of our true crime junkie fans out there, you guys know what an acquittal means, right? That means double jeopardy is now a factor. So, no matter what happens later, he can't, can't by law, he cannot double jeopardy, and we'll get into that next time. So thank you, guys for listening. Thank you so much for being patient with me, because I know this episode got out late and I apologize.
Speaker 2:This is essentially still an open case, cold case, unsolved. It is not.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying.
Speaker 2:I mean technically I, oh it's unsolved because they fucked up.
Speaker 1:No, no no, no, technically it is, but it isn't because they just couldn't. They couldn't prosecute him again.
Speaker 2:But you guys will see which means they fucked up.
Speaker 1:They know it and it's not that they effed up, it's just that they basically you want to mean they didn't know that?
Speaker 1:They did, they absolutely did. But I honestly believe and especially in this case, that's the reason I went into all of the background of NCAA issues, all of the NLU problems and, you know, all of the stigma that was hanging over them at the time I believe that all of that played a bigger role in his acquittal than anything else, because there was the black white stigma of a black man killing a white woman. Oh, you just want to frame it on me because I'm the easiest target, because I'm the only one who had any kind of argument with her, even though you have no evidence, no proof all of the things like that was a big player.
Speaker 1:And then you also have this they brought up the lesbian relationship at trial with Joel, who vehemently denied it, and then none of the other teammates would step up and say anything, otherwise None of the none of the coach, even though everybody knew that's what it was. And I feel like if there were balls dropped, it wasn't on the investigation, it wasn't on the DA, although they did let a rookie, a freaking rookie. It was her very first criminal trial as an ADA for Washington Parish. They let her lead this trial. Yeah, so anyway, that's where we're going to leave you for this time.
Speaker 1:I'll do a quick recap on the next episode, which means you'll get an episode next week instead of having to wait two weeks. So again, you're welcome. We love you. Go check out our website, our TikTok, our YouTube. Been getting lots of thumbs up on my YouTube here recently, so I appreciate that from everybody who goes on there and does that. If you have a second, leave us a rating and review. If not, just tell your friends about us and shoot us any kind of case that you've come into contact with or you would like to hear us cover, or something that you just would think would be an interesting story, because I love those, those are my favorite. Give me something to deep dive into and please don't, Please do.
Speaker 2:Everyone's know. I like to talk to her.
Speaker 1:All right, guys, you guys take care out there and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2:I'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:Bye.
